I feel like every time I try to give a rough description of some idea or concept to a search engine, the results are seldom anything more than useless/misleading. But then, when I find out there’s a technical or standard term for whatever concept I’m trying to convey, using that term drastically improves the search results (even if in the end I don’t get the answer I need). Since this is a struggle that I face pretty often, I will many times just give up on raw searching and end up describing the exact thing to some LLM, even the AI assist of whatever search engine I am using.
On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that search engines have just gotten worse over time as the internet gets flooded with useless/AI-generated/low effort algorithm-bait websites, so most successful searches I do usually end up with the “reddit” suffix, or maybe a look through wikipedia, or maybe some other forum.
But back to the core issue, how do I go from something like “tracking bounding box followed by the camera computer graphics” to “camera deadzone”?, or “orelse-like operator in typescript” to “nullish coalescing operator”? and plenty of examples like these. I know the usual is to rephrase the search, look for synonyms, make the search more targeted, etc. But is there any website/search engine that makes it easier to find standard terms from descriptions? I feel like a full-blown LLM is just overkill for this purpose.
Ask a human.
“What’s the scientific term for when a word is on the tip of your tongue?”
“It’s literally just TOT (tip of the tongue)”
I initially thought your question would be about translating technical terms between languages. If it’s an extremely technical term that’s unlikely to be in a dictionary I look up the Wikipedia article in English and then see if there’s a corresponding article in the target language (usually Spanish in my case). The above phenomenon is PDL (punto de la lengua) in Spanish.
Ten years ago I would have recommended Google because me typing ‘car delays when stepping on gas’ would give me results for hesitating or whatever the right term is. It used to be that you could take a wild guess on a search engine and find the right terms for better results. Now it does seem like you need to know the terms before using a web search. Sometimes I can get the right term by posting a question on a forum or fediverse type site where a human can take a guess.
It sucks that something that worked so well a decade ago is completely useless now. I even have to go to rotten tomatoes or IMDB to find older versions of movies that had recent remakes because web searches only return the most recent remake.
I use duckduckgo and sometimes it gives me better answers, but I do feel like SEO optimization has led to a kind of useless noise of search results that is improved by using an LLM to search for the needle of valuable information in that haystack of noise.
It’s not always true, so I still use search engines when I can, but unfortunately I have become increasingly reliant on LLMs as a kind of “efficient search engine” which could probably be solved with better industry practices and regulations to prevent the kind of SEO competition that leads to such useless websites vying for clicks.
